Blend Labs, Inc. (NYSE: BLND) has expanded Blend Autopilot adoption, with its tenth lender joining the agentic AI platform for home lending. The milestone follows six months of live-loan operations and three months of commercial availability.
At the same time, the number of loan applications handled by Autopilot on a weekly basis is about 3,500 loans per week, which is about 200,000 loans on an annualized basis, thus showing increased interest in the automation of AI lending.
Lenders Expand Adoption Across Home Lending
The latest additions include Whatcom Educational Credit Union (WECU), one of Washington’s largest credit unions, and Gate City Bank. Other participating lenders represent community financial institutions, regional banks, and mortgage providers.
Nima Ghamsari, Co-founder and Head of Blend, highlighted the importance of working closely with lenders.
“We’re incredibly proud to be building alongside lenders who aren’t waiting for the future of lending, but helping create it,” said Nima Ghamsari, Co-founder and Head of Blend. “Every loan Autopilot works and every lender putting it into production helps our engineers make the system better, and moves us closer to a fundamentally different lending experience. That partnership has always been one of Blend’s greatest strengths. We’re moving fast, our customers are moving fast with us, and together we’re leading the agentic transformation of lending.”
He added that every loan processed helps engineers improve Autopilot and advance the lending experience. He also emphasized the role of customer partnerships in accelerating the agentic transformation of lending.
The AI-powered agents in Autopilot help in document and income verification, following up on borrowers, preliminary underwriting, and quality control during the mortgage and home equity closing process.
As for the previous results that had been presented, there have been 10 to 15 percent more pull throughs, and the cycle time has been reduced by two to four days. On the other hand, the platform helps automate an average of 4.5 hours of fulfillment work per loan.
Onity Mortgage Reports Early Progress
Onity Mortgage, which serves 1.4 million customers, was among Autopilot’s earliest adopters. The lender initially deployed the platform’s pre-underwriting agent to improve customer self-service.
Patrick Joyce, VP of Digital Products at Onity Mortgage, explained the benefits.
“What Blend Autopilot has allowed us to do is continue to improve the customer self-serve experience,” said Patrick Joyce, VP of Digital Products at Onity Mortgage. “We’re seeing that our cycle times are improving, and then looking at the data, you can see why that is. You can see that customers are uploading documents when it’s convenient to them this is weekends, this is after our business hours and when they upload a document, instead of the document sitting there and being picked up hours later, Autopilot’s pre-underwriting agent is reviewing that automatically, determining if that’s the right document. And if not, then conditioning the customer back.”
He noted that customers can upload documents outside business hours. Autopilot reviews submissions automatically, checks whether they meet requirements, and requests corrections when necessary. As a result, documents no longer need to wait hours for manual review.
Building AI Across the Lending Lifecycle
Blend aims to connect intelligence across customer engagement, applications, document processing, loan officer productivity, and closing quality.
The system of autopilot enables this approach by providing agents that are capable of analyzing the loans, determining the next steps, and taking action. Besides that, the lenders can also use agents from the Blend system or create their own via the MCP server.
This can be done using lending information provided by Blend, over 150 integrations, and workflow tools developed over almost 15 years of experience. With such an approach, the lenders have the opportunity to enhance their AI technologies throughout the entire lending process cycle.
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News Source: Businesswire.com
